What are the basic activities of information management?

Business Model

EIM supports all aspects of the business. Where there is data or content, EIM is there. EIM does not change business strategy, it mirrors it. EIM strives to identify where data and content can improve business processes, and provide oversight of all content in the organization.

EIM needs to understand the Business Model to align with what the business needs to support business goals.

Data governance becomes part of the Business Model. It is not intrusive; it is a new business function.

EIM makes sure that business needs and the Business Model are respected, but change needs to happen.

Information Handling and Use

EIM ensures efficient, appropriate movement and access, and ensures efficiency and enabling of business processes. The incremental implementation, but global vision of the handling of information, is handled to ensure economical placement of content for right place and right time.

Information Life Cycle

Data has a life cycle that touches all parts of an enterprise, not just specific processes. While identifying opportunities to exploit data, EIM must also balance data risk and data leverage.

Applications

EIM ensures that there are no “local” EIM policies, only local applications. Business needs are met, but the mistakes and excessive costs of the past are avoided through oversight of applications development and information use. The Road Map phase supplies incremental applications that can add value but be managed with minimal risk.

There are no “technology projects” that cause loss of interest. There are business projects.

Technology

The EIM program coordinates with the Enterprise Architecture area to ensure technology supports the business and the technology investments are being aligned.

Organization

EIM is able to understand that all areas may be affected by EIM, but in a positive way. EIM helps design appropriate organizations and manage organizational changes incrementally, and helps organizations manage application changes for business areas. EIM also creates a new organization that ensures inventory management for data.

Compliance

EIM integrates legal, compliance, regulations, and data governance to provide deeper insight into the risk that is buried in data and content. Compliance areas can be leveraged to assist EIM and data governance.

Enterprise “DNA”

Managing information assets means oversight of the definitions, lineage, usage, and administration of the various assets covered by EIM. The EIM team will call the DNA metadata. The maintenance administration of good metadata ties the EIM Architecture together. Data governance ensures metadata is maintained and used.

Culture

EIM reveals to the enterprise how things get done in regards to data and content. While cultures must, to some extent, change, EIM attempts to leverage culture during the change process. The changes brought by EIM create resistance that must be managed.

Governance

The EIM program uses data governance to keep IT activity aligned with business needs. Data governance also provides for enforcing standards. Data governance creates rules for how and where data moves. Data governance is the compliance building block of EIM.

Managed Content

IAM states that all content is eligible. If your organization is balanced on information as fuel vs. lubricant, the EIM finds the correct mix of Information Maturity. EIM manages integration while doing the work that has to be done.

There is content in departments and remote offices. EIM manages this content as well to ensure the organization does not incur risk.

1.4 Who benefits from better PIM and how?

PIM may involve the “personal,” but better PIM promises to bring broad societal benefit:

Within organizations, better PIM can mean better employee productivity. Better PIM can mean that employees have a clearer understanding of their information and their needs. Such an understanding can also facilitate better teamwork and better group information management.4 Longer-term, PIM is key to the management and leveraging of employee expertise. (See Chapter 3's discussion of knowledge management.)

Progress in PIM is evidenced not only by better tools but also by new teachable strategies of information management of direct relevance to education programs of information literacy.5

As people age, their working memory (the number of things they can keep in mind at one time) generally decreases. Better PIM can translate to compensating tools and strategies of support.

The challenges of PIM are especially felt by people who are battling a life-threatening illness such as cancer as they try to maintain their jobs and profession-related activities while living their lives and fulfilling their various roles (as parent, spouse, friend, member of a community, etc.). Better PIM can help patients better manage their treatments and their lives overall.6

But certainly better PIM benefits you, regardless of your special circumstances. There is little chance you could be reading these lines were information and external forms of information (email messages, web pages, newspapers, this book) not of great importance to your world-view and the way you lead your life.

Consider two kinds of people, information warriors and information worriers. Information warriors see their information and their information tools as strategic assets. Information warriors are wiling to invest time and money to keep up with the latest in PDAs, smartphones, operating systems and application software, and anything new on the Web. For an information warrior, information technology is, so to speak, a profit center.

By contrast, information technology for information worriers is a cost center. New offerings in PDAs and smartphones, new releases of operating system and application software, new developments in the alphabet soup of Web-based initiatives—these and other developments in information technology represent more time and money that need to be spent just to keep up with everyone else. Information worriers may have a nagging feeling they could do better in their choice of supporting tools and strategies. But they don't know where to begin.

Even if these descriptions are stereotyped, many of us can probably think of people we know who come close to fitting each description. Perhaps you are an information warrior or an information worrier. Or perhaps, like me, you are a little of both.

The simple fact is that even if we embrace new developments in information technology, we must recognize that we don't always have the time to learn about all the latest developments. We need a basis for deciding whether a new tool or a new way of doing things is likely to work for us. We'd like to avoid investing money and, more important, time to learn to use a new tool or strategy only to conclude belatedly that it won't work for us.

Better PIM starts by asking the right questions. Better PIM means that each of us becomes a student of our practice of PIM.

Just because it's common sense, doesn't mean it's common practice.

U.S. actor, lecturer, and humorist Will Rogers (1879–1935)

EIM strategy

EIM strategy is the approach that an organization takes to orchestrate its technology, organization, and people to build and sustain the organization’s information management capability. It basically sets the goals and approach for EIM governance. EIM should be derived from and closely aligned to the corporate business strategy and business objectives.

IMPORTANT

EIM strategy is the approach that an organization takes to orchestrate its technology, organization, and people to build and sustain the organization’s information management capability.

Sometimes information strategy can influence business strategy as it might have the potential to transform the business to increase competitive advantage. EIM strategy consists of three parts:

Technology strategy, which is the approach to manage the IT infrastructure.

Systems, which are the information systems and surrounding business processes.

Content, which is the information contained in the systems.

The ultimate goal is the creation of an information-enabled enterprise that is driven by information in all its core activities, which can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage in the market. EIM strategy goes far beyond technological issues, incorporating aspects such as strategic management, globalization, change management, and human/cultural issues (Galliers and Leidner, 2009). EIM strategy has to coordinate a number of different disciplines, which are explored in the following sections.

The Nature of EIM Development

The EIM design process is iterative. At each major stage, you will need to strive to provide real value to the organization. Enough detail needs to be presented to permit comprehension and continued buy-in. Additionally, each major step has to deliver enough detail to allow the organization to make strategic decisions in regards to EIM. You should be able to answer the following questions:

Do we still see business value?

Is the EIM vision consistently applied?

Are all the EIM building blocks and required “day-in-the-life” aspects being addressed?

If we stopped the EIM program’s design at this point, can we discern a tactical effort that can still add business value without a full EIM effort?

It’s important to be realistic. We have already touched upon the ugly truth that many organizations have tried EIM-type efforts and not sustained them. It is quite possible business or cultural conditions may affect any contemporary attempt to manage information. This is not the preferred course of action but stuff happens. For example, it may be pragmatic (but not more economical) to do a “piece” of an IM project to prove the concept. So we need to have enough detail to add value, but not so much that there is any need to revisit a prior step and cause disruption in progress. We need the proper level of detail to do EIM, but not generate superfluous material. More importantly, we need to base our approach on concepts that avoid typical pitfalls of strategic program development.

How Does Asset Treatment Deal with These?

EIM has usually been approached in a reactive manner. The scenarios presented earlier in this chapter impart a case for formal management of information as an asset. Formal management, of course, means an emphasis on proactive vs. reactive. It also means policies and procedures to avoid mismanagement of data and content, including data quality and distribution.

First, we are not just creating a strategic plan. Regardless of the intent, very few “strategic plans” result in a flexible approach that is responsive to business changes and easy to roll out. Granted, EIM uses strategic planning techniques, but the outcome is not a plan—because if you accept the premise of asset management of content and data, then you don’t need a strategy to convince you to do it. You need to build the programs. The business has its strategic business plan. That is enough.

In fact, strategic plan is a misnomer—and a bad approach. Plans have a tendency to sit on the shelf. IAM means invoking a program (called EIM) that creates a vision, and deals with issues both tactically and strategically.

EIM in this context is a strategic function, like marketing or budgeting. EIM is its own strategic area and like others (marketing, sales, R&D) contributes and coordinates toward reaching organization goals. Are there marketing plans that are done in a vacuum? Of course not.

IAM/EIM may also offer a different approach than expected; we will focus on moving IT toward the business side, in fact, urge elimination of the IT/business distinction altogether under this program.

Concluding Remarks

EIIM is a key component of MDM because it acts as the “memory” for the entities under management. The memory elements are the EIS storing the identity information for these entities. The EIIM process tries to create EIS to represent each of the entities under management in such a way that each entity is represented by one and only one EIS, and different entities are represented by different EIS. This is the goal of entity identity integrity. Several metrics for measuring goal achievement include false positive and false negative rates, accuracy, recall, precision, and the T-W Index.

The second goal of EIIM is to maintain persistent entity identifiers, i.e. the EIS representing an entity under management should always have the same identifier. Assigning and maintaining persistent identifiers is not possible without implementing some type of EIIM strategy that creates and saves identity information in an EIS. The most popular EIIM strategies are survivor record, exemplar record, attribute-based, or record-based EIS.

There are several styles of MDM architecture to choose from including external reference, registry, reconciliation engine, and transaction hub. The selection of an architecture should be carefully considered and depends on a number of factors. These factors include the volume of identities to be managed, the degree of integration between the MDM and the client systems, the volatility of the entity identity, and the requirements for time-to-update and inquiry response time.

Approach Considerations

If EIM is in place, revisiting the business case is a matter of reloading numbers and assumptions. While this is optional for forming the program, I would always look at the case at this step when making a pass though an existing EIM program. Is the effort is stalled? Is there resistance? The objectives and goals are handy and can be plugged in to your model.

If you are doing either an initial EIM program, or a major overhaul of EIM and related efforts, think about whether you need to support a vision and mission statement, and/or you need some early financial data. Starting the business case earlier provides time to address resistance to assembling hard data, or worth through the calculations with your financial team. Often this will be new territory for finance and the EIM team. Determining the financial methods and assigning benefits may require spreading the effort of a business case between this activity and the Business Case activity.

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